Exploring Creative Tourism: Editors Introduction

This paper provides an overview of the contributions to special issue of the Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice entitled "Exploring Creative Tourism‟. Creative tourism has grown rapidly in the past decade, reflecting the growing desire of consumers to develop their own creative potential and to attach themselves to creative networks, as well as the need for creative producers, cities and regions to profile themselves in an increasingly crowded global market. The case studies in the special issue examine creative tourism in a range of different contexts and present a range of models of creative tourism development in fields such as music, art, heritage and crafts. Creative tourism can therefore be viewed as a form of networked tourism, which depends on the ability of producers and consumers to relate to each other and to generate value from their encounters